Negation
The last section of the Discussion addresses the role of negation in the two speeches. As observed in previous sections, negation is significantly more frequent in Obama’s speech than in Bush’s. The use of negation in Bush’s speech is illustrated in examples (63) to (69) below:
- (63) They hate your government because it does [[not]] share their dark vision.
- (64) We will [[not]] abandon you to terrorists or extremists.
- (65) History teaches us that the road to freedom is [[not]] always even, and democracy does not come overnight.
- (66) No terrorist or tyrant [[can]] take that away.
- (67) The road to freedom is not always even, and democracy does [[not]] come overnight.
- (68) Most people do [[not]] want war and bloodshed and violence.
- (69) They say that the Arab people are [[not]] “ready” for democracy.
The examples above show a use of negation to introduce general statements (the road to freedom is not always even, and democracy does not come overnight, most people do not want bloodshed and violence) or to present the dark vision of the relation between the US and the Middle East, where loaded lexical items such as hate and terrorist stand out (examples (63) and (64)).
Negation in Obama’s speech is used extensively to correct previous assumptions on the relations between the US and the Middle East, as well as to correct assumptions the US may have about Arabic countries and Arabic countries may have on the US:
